David T. Courtwright

On his book No Right Turn: Conservative Politics in a Liberal America

Cover Interview of October 31, 2010

Lastly

No Right Turn is a historical critique of conservative politics—not an attack on conservative values.

I have nothing against sound budgets, safe streets, and stable families, the best safeguard of children’s welfare. I suspect that many battle-hardened conservatives (and, for that matter, liberals) share my belief that Republican politicians from Nixon on have used conservatism more as a means to power than a blueprint for governing.

I was struck, when I interviewed the likes of Randall Terry and Paul Weyrich, by how much they sounded like George McGovern or Michael Dukakis on the subject of GOP dissembling—and not just on moral issues like abortion.

Conservative anger over bait-and-switch tactics, which reached a boil during George W. Bush’s second term, has again become an important force in American politics. Though the book ends with Barack Obama’s 2008 election, it serves as a prologue for the Tea Party, which is as much inspired by the contemporary politics of betrayal and predation as by the idealized golden-age politics of the Founding Fathers.

The dominant premise in evolution and economics is that a person is being loyal to natural law if he or she attends to self’s interest and welfare before being concerned with the needs and demands of family or community. The public does not realize that this statement is not an established scientific principle but an ethical preference. Nonetheless, this belief has created a moral confusion among North Americans and Europeans because the evolution of our species was accompanied by the disposition to worry about kin and the collectives to which one belongs.Jerome Kagan, Interview of September 17, 2009

[T]he Holocaust transformed our whole way of thinking about war and heroism. War is no longer a proving ground for heroism in the same way it used to be. Instead, war now is something that we must avoid at all costs—because genocides often take place under the cover of war. We are no longer all potential soldiers (though we are that too), but we are all potential victims of the traumas war creates. This, at least, is one important development in the way Western populations envision war, even if it does not always predominate in the thinking of our political leaders.Carolyn J. Dean, Interview of February 01, 2011